Patricia S. Foy
Patricia S. Foy, Professor Emerita of Music Education, retired from full-time teaching in May 2023 but continues to teach part-time at the Petrie School of Music. After earning her undergraduate degree in music education at Converse, where her major teachers were Alia Lawson and Eleanor White, she taught choral and general music in the public schools of Greenville County and Darlington County, SC, and in Cobb County, GA, before joining Converse as a faculty member. During her tenure at Converse, she taught a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including methodology for teaching general music and choral music, piano class, voice class, music technology and Modern Band. She also served in a variety of leadership roles, including Department Chair, Assistant Dean, and Director of the Petrie School of Music.
Dr. Foy earned the Master of Music Education and Ph.D. degrees in Music Education from the University of South Carolina, where she was the graduate editor for Update: Applications of Research in Music Education. She was among the first university music education faculty in the United States to be named a Modern Band Fellow by the Little Kids Rock organization (now known as Music Will), integrating that approach into Converse’s music education degrees along with her colleague, Dr. Susana Lalama. Dr. Foy holds a certificate in the Kodály method, having completed all three levels of training.
She is an active member and ruling elder at the First Presbyterian Church of Spartanburg, where she sings in the Chancel Choir and the Chamber Singers and chairs the International Missions Committee. In recent years she played keyboard with the Blue Regime, an upstate cover band that specialized in rock music of the 60s and 70s
The founder of the summer South Carolina Music Technology Institute, Dr. Foy was awarded nearly $700,000 from the SC Department of Education and the SC Arts in Basic Curriculum Project over 18 years to train South Carolina public school music teachers in music technology.
Dr. Foy has been active in the Southeast as a clinician, consultant, and choral adjudicator, and continues to serve as a visiting evaluator of university music programs across the United States for the National Association of Schools of Music. An active member of NAfME: The National Association for Music Education, she is a Past President and the current Executive Director of the South Carolina Music Educators Association (SCMEA), the SC affiliate of NAfME, and was named to the SCMEA Hall of Fame in 2010. She served thirteen years as a member of the Steering Committee for the South Carolina Arts in Basic Curriculum Project and is a former member of the Board of the SC Alliance for Arts Education, an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.